Date:   6/23/2003 5:20:49 PM ( 21 y ago)
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Can Bush Be Both Ignorant and a Liar?
Yes. There's no reason for Bush-bashers to choose between the two.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Monday, June 23, 2003, at 2:31 PM PT

Is President Bush a liar? The New York Times' David Rosenbaum
examined this question with a surfeit of post-Howell-Raines
fair-mindedness in the June 22 "Week in Review" section. His bottom line:
"[A] review of the president's public statements found little that could lead
to a conclusion that the president actually lied" in two particular instances.
The first was when Bush claimed he knew Saddam Hussein to possess
large quantities of nuclear and biological weapons. The second was when
Bush claimed that his tax cut would provide tax relief for everyone who
pays income taxes. In both instances, Chatterbox is baffled by
Rosenbaum's doubt.

Let's address Bush's tax claim first. Its falsity is not in dispute. Chatterbox
has written elsewhere that Bush lied when he said, "My jobs and growth
plan would reduce tax rates for everyone who pays income tax." (The
Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center found 8.1 million
people who pay taxes but will receive no tax cuts.) Rosenbaum recognized
that Bush's statement was untrue but expressed doubt that Bush knew it to
be untrue. Can a false statement be a lie if the speaker is unaware it is a
lie?

That leads us immediately to a second question, one that Rosenbaum dared
not address: Why is the speaker unaware that his statement is a lie? In
Bush's case, the answer is painfully obvious. It's because Bush is a
functionally not-bright man. As Chatterbox has explained elsewhere, it's
impossible to tell—and, ultimately, of little interest—whether Bush lacks
the necessary mental equipment, or whether he's simply incurious. The end
result is the same. Even Bush's allies concede that Bush is strikingly
ignorant. In the July Vanity Fair, Sam Tanenhaus quoted Richard Perle as
saying that when he first met Bush, it was "clear" that "he didn't know very
much." Perle went on to argue (with what he failed to recognize as
condescension) that Bush is an eager pupil. But there isn't much evidence
to support even that.

It's often said that Bush has the virtue of self-awareness, that he knows
what he doesn't know. That's probably true. But if it is true, then Bush
really oughtn't to go around making sweeping statements that he hasn't
made any effort to verify. When these statements turn out to be untrue,
Bush's feigned certainty alone justifies calling these statements lies. They
may not be the sort of lies a clever person (say, Bill Clinton) would tell.
Indeed, many left-of-center commentators (Paul Krugman and Eric
Alterman come to mind) refuse to admit that Bush is dumb, presumably
because they fear that would make it impossible to hold him accountable
for terrible things that he and his administration do. (Many felt the same
way about Reagan.) But there's no reason Bush can't be thought of as
both stupid and a liar. As Slate's Michael Kinsley has noted, Bush's lies
are typically lies of laziness: "If telling the truth was less bother, [he'd] try
that too."

Saying that Bush lacks much on the ball does not mean that he never lies
the way clever people do. Surely, for instance, Bush is aware on some
level that it has yet to be proved that Saddam Hussein had chemical and
biological weapons stashed away prior to the war. In addressing this
question, Rosenbaum let Bush off the hook by focusing on what he said
before the war began, e.g., "Intelligence gathered by this and other
governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and
conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." Like Rosenbaum,
Chatterbox is eager to cut Bush some slack on this, if only because
Chatterbox, too, was convinced prior to the war that the presence of
biological and chemical weapons had been proved. (Click here and here to
read two columns Chatterbox now wishes he'd never written.) But
Rosenbaum never considered what Bush said on Polish television after the
war ended:

We've found the weapons of mass destruction. You
know, we found biological laboratories. You remember
when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world and he
said Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build
biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the
United Nations' resolutions and we've so far
discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time
goes on.

In fact, it has yet to be proved that the two mobile labs were used (or even
designed to be used) to build biological weapons. It isn't possible that Bush
fails to grasp that. So, why did he say something so obviously untrue?
Chatterbox posed the question to The Nation's David Corn, who has
written extensively on the question of Bush's veracity. In Corn's view, the
key to Bush's lies isn't necessarily that he doesn't know any better, but that
he doesn't care. "He mischaracterizes situations to fit his pattern of
thinking," Corn explained. "Does he believe he's lying? I don't know." But
"he still should be held accountable, whether he made a mistake of this
nature in good faith or in bad faith." Amen.
 

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